The White Line

Maybe it’s time Portlanders reschedule their ski season.

They call the dark spots “cancer.”
“That’s the industry term, because once you have that dark spot, it’ll collect heat and spread,” says Dave Tragethon, PR director for Mount Hood Meadows. “Snow’s white and it reflects the sun, but once it gets dark it collects the heat and it starts warming up the ground around it.”
We’re standing in the lift line last Sunday, the 118th and final day of operations at Meadows. I’m standing on a 30-inch base, but just a few feet away you can see bare grass that will soon sprout wildflowers.
It’s been a rough winter all along the West Coast. At Meadows, the end of the season has a bittersweet note. On one hand, it was a short season. On the other hand, it could have been a lot worse—just look at Skibowl. And it would have been worse had the resort not developed new techniques for harvesting and storing snowpack to build enough of a base at the bottom of the hill.
“We’re standing on November snow,” says Tragethon. “We harvested this from our parking lot and saved every inch of it, and it’s what got us through.”
Skiing on snow that was scraped off a parking lot isn’t especially sexy. And to a certain class of Portland powder hounds there’s likely something off-putting about it. But given our warming Earth’s new weather patterns, I think it’s important to adjust your paradigms if you want to continue enjoying snow sports.
Oregon’s resorts were built for an era when the white line that separates winter from spring sat much lower on the hill. Meadows slopes got just 100 inches of snow this season, and much of the snow that fell was higher on the mountain than in the past. Compare that to a typical year, when it’s more like 450 inches. In a very heavy year the snowfall has topped 800.
“We’re lucky in that we do have good snow up top,” says Tom Scully, director of mountain operations. “The issue is connecting the base area to that, which is where the snow harvesting came in. It used to be that we were looking for a place to put all the snow that fell. Now, we’re trying to conserve it and use it to fill the gaps.”
That’s a new mindset on Hood, where snow had long fallen in dumps of heavy, damp powder. But it may well be our new reality. And it could be much worse. Spring skiing came a month earlier than I’d like, but I still enjoy the vibe—warm cans of Miller Lite on the sink in the men’s room, a big line for a squirt from an industrial-size jug of sunblock, a beer patio full of people decked out in vintage jackets.
And then there was the guy in a Viking suit, who actually stopped midrun to thank Scully for the efforts to extend the season, which involved buying new equipment to haul and store snow and long hours for Sam Cordell, who is in charge of slope maintenance. “I grew up on a farm, so I know how it is,” says the Viking. “They did an amazing job with what they had.”
Not everyone was happy, of course. I also rode with a guy in a tie-dyed shirt who complained that they should have done more to keep snow on the Stadium trail, a wide, grassy run better handled at this point with a mountain bike instead of skis. Then again, this guy did rack up more than a million vertical feet over the course of the season, and rode the lift some 800 times.
“I live for this, so this winter sucked” he said. “But it could’ve been worse.”
For the resorts, obviously, it’s bad for a bunch of reasons. Including the cost of managing their precious-little natural snow. Operating a snowcat for three hours costs about $500, the price of one season ticket, and they had as many as 12 of them running at once when the skies opened up.
But that’s what it takes to adjust. The resorts seem to be figuring this out faster than the customers. When the best snowfall of the year came last week, most skiers and boarders I know were already done. That’s Portland: The season begins after Christmas, not with the first snowfall around Thanksgiving. The season starts winding down in early March, a full month before the Cascadian snowpack reaches its peak. So it is for people who have always been blessed with abundance.
Well, unless you’re a climate-change denier, you need to reschedule your ski season. Because, Sunday was a great day to be out on the slopes.
“Traditionally resorts don’t close because they run out of snow, but because they run out of people,” says Tragethon. “I don’t know if it’s just seeing that white line or if it’s the weather in town or what, but people just stop coming even when there’s still good snow.”

Willamette Week

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.